Washington, DC on $85 a Day

Washington, DC on $85 a Day
Originally uploaded by Musely

Inventive use of a narrow aperture

Grand Place

Grand Place
Originally uploaded by Musely

Stunning view of the Grand' Place by Brendan

Lighting

One obsession of mine - amongst many - is light bulbs.

With the disappearance of incandescent bulbs (not entirely warranted I must add) there are new forms and styles to consider.

So here is one of the more alien options.

1963

From Wil Wheaton's twitter :


If loving New Order's 1963 is wrong, I don't want to be right. In fact, if loving Joy Division and New Order is wrong, SHUT UP.



Thank you Wil :-)

My Lost City - First Review

The cover is sublime, an imaginary city with skyscrapers impossibly tall leading into an infinite fog of diffused light. A freeway overpass approaching from the distance merging into an unbelievably complex form of flyover. 

And impossibly small beneath the flyover, in the underpass, amongst vague lights and obscure street forms, a solitary figure walks with his back to the camera, a man in a grey suit and a hat. The quiet man. Detached and moving through this insane cityscape.

Beyond the cover, the CD disc itself is also a work of art, as have been all the John Foxx releases in 2009 - a plain black label with black text on top - made visible as the text is gloss black against the matt of the background.

Serious pleasure before the music is played..

And the music? It's a kind of a secular hymnal music - a mass for a city of obscure and derelict architecture. 

The names of the tracks make explicit references to modernist brutalist structures, the Barbican and Trellick Tower. Also references to ancient brutalising buildings such as Hawkesmoor churches. The liner notes make clear that the music is representing a London from an imaginary past, the layer of the centuries coming together to mix ancient devotional music with modern synthesizer acoustics.

The music drifts by with washes of chords - no drums or rhythms. Some tracks have Foxx's vocals seemingly singing in a lost and unknown language, as in the Cathedral Oceans albums.

But what to make of it all? I would not recommend this CD to someone unfamiliar to John Foxx's work. I however have been listening to Foxx for over 25 years, and this disc fits in with the overall picture of this man's work and concepts. It takes a strand of DNA from the Cathedral Oceans project, most notably for me the track "City of Endless Stairways" on Cathedral Oceans III, and fleshes out the ideas into 11 tracks. 

The writings by John Foxx about this disc allude to discarded ideas and forgotten cassette tape recordings dating from as early as the last days of the 1970s. Forgotten electrical waves imprinted onto solidified remains of prehistoric forests.